Quotes of the day

President Obama’s post-convention bounce has grown to four points according to two new polls released Saturday.

Gallup’s daily tracking poll has Obama at 49 percent support among registered voters to GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s 45 percent…

A Reuters/Ipsos daily-tracking poll released Saturday also gave Obama a 4-point lead. Obama leads Romney 47 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. On Friday, Obama overtook Romney in the same poll and held a 46 to 44 percent edge.

“The bump is actually happening,” said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark. “How big it’ll be and how long it will last remains to be seen,” she added.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows President Obama attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns 45% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and three percent (3%) are undecided…

This is the president’s biggest lead over Romney among Likely Voters since March 17. See daily tracking history. Obama’s convention bounce is evident both in the head-to-head numbers with Romney and in his Job Approval ratings…

A president’s job approval rating is one of the best indicators for assessing his chances of reelection. Typically, the president’s job approval rating on Election Day will be close to the share of the vote he receives. Currently, 52% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president’s job performance. That’s his highest approval rating in more than a year-and-a-half, since January 2011.

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult…

Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters four-to-one,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by four or five points and trailing in Colorado by two points, if you are trailing in Nevada by two or three points, you are not going to win in those states.

Once upon a time, the Romney campaign dreamed of putting New Jersey, New Mexico, and Oregon in play. Now, just a few months later, they are on the precipice of giving up on Michigan and Pennsylvania, and they are still behind in Ohio.

So using money to try to make Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin competitve is sensible, maybe essential. Right now, Romney-Ryan has fewer electoral college paths than Kerry-Edwards did at this point in 2004.

“We’re very comfortable with the reality of what this race is about, and we’re not in the momentum business,” said Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist. “We’re in the talking-to-voters-about-their-lives business.”…

The 1980 analogy holds for Romney the potential for a breakthrough during or after the debates. In that campaign, Ronald Reagan trailed President Jimmy Carter into the month of October. He moved ahead after the candidates’ only head-to-head debate. Romney advisers have said for months that the longer they stay roughly even with the president, the better their chances of winning in November.

Obama advisers, however, see that as a flawed analogy. The electorate was less polarized then than now, with more opportunity for each candidate to attract a larger number of undecided voters than exists today. They also note that Reagan’s image was more positive than Romney’s has been. “There are so many ways that’s not plausible,” Axelrod said of the 1980 analogy, “starting with Obama’s not Carter and Romney’s not Reagan.”

Thursday night in Charlotte, Barack Obama doubled down on his liberalism, articulating the case for big government, greater regulation, and more spending (which he calls “investing”). He defined a choice that is starkly ideological, courageously embracing the left. We have not seen such positioning since the days of Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale. And with good reason: the American people are conservative…

While eloquent as he accepted his party’s nomination, Obama failed to go after Mitt Romney in his speech and throughout the whole Democratic convention. “The folks in Tampa,” “the Republican establishment” and “the conservative Congress” all came in for a thrashing. Mitt Romney was not on the list in both Clinton and Obama’s speeches. In fact, his name was hardly mentioned — an odd occurrence in view of the over $100 million Obama has spent on ads attacking Romney…

The result of these two conventions is a decided advantage for Romney.

Wisconsin is a big target. It has been the whole damn time. All the groaning and eeyoring by folks over it’s absence in the first release was weak-kneed silliness, as much as the fretting over “120% turnout in Madison” was for the recall. Team Romney is going to attack a vastly larger map than what McCain was desperately trying to win avoid embarrassment and hold in 08. Enjoy that bounce from the convention while you can, President Obama. The ads and GOTV rollout begins now, and no amount of scale-thumbing by Purely Partisan Polling will be able to deflect a 9-figure onslaught.

Why the Media Predict-o-Herd is wrong 1.They ignore the coming ad blitz and cash advantage Romney holds…

4. After 200 million against Romney and a thousand hits by press stenographers running Chicago’s hits, Romney is alive…and inoculated.

5. Registration numbers in key states ain’t pretty for Obama: in 2008 Dems had a 670k reg adv in Fl and he barrrely won. Now? Only 440k…

8. The same “Democrat victory is inevitable” stories from every cycle except 84 are an echo of the era of Gang of 500 agenda power.

On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy. My father, the least cynical of men, used to quote a political philosopher to the effect that democracy will work until people figure out they can vote themselves money. I fear that time may have come…

Maybe this anxiety is misplaced. President Obama has never been able to rise above 47% support in the polls, and perhaps when November comes undecided voters will break against the incumbent, as the conventional wisdom has it. Maybe the election won’t be so close after all. We’d all better hope so. Because, given the rate at which Democrats are frantically adding to the dependency state, another four years of Obama may be enough to tip the balance between the private sector and government dependence once and for all.

[O]nce you accept a wealth-redistribution system in which government becomes the arbiter of “social justice,” the ball game is over. If government is given license to even the scales between the have-nots and the haves, the political incentive to even them will be constant and overpowering: Enough will never be enough. If the rationale for giving government this power is that the asset in question is corporate property, not private, what is to be the limiting principle? Why health care but not housing or income? And when it comes to providing for the truly needy among 310 million people, central-government planners will simply never be as good at it as decent societies and their local governments. And so the allocation of burdens and benefits in federal entitlement programs is guaranteed to be warped, wasteful, and ultimately unsustainable.

Yet, no political party is making that case. Both candidates want you to know they are sentries of the safety net. And no major conservative journal or think tank, it seems, would have it any other way. Concededly, the GOP’s approach, “Let’s work within this implausible system and do the best we can to patch it up . . . someday,” is a more attractive position than Obama’s “Let’s break the bank now.” But inspiring? . . . Not exactly…

Obama’s base, that lost third of the country, may not be as enthralled as they were in 2008. But they are committed, utterly convinced about who the villains are, and prepared to be as chameleon as it takes to reel in, from the culture they dominate, the additional 15 percent or so needed to push their guy across the finish line. That’s how what should be a landslide for his opponent becomes a squeaker.

Only the Romney campaign can cut through the cultural, educational, and media filters and force a debate over the Obama Democrats’ bogus redefinition of the American dream. The media can ignore what conservatives say, but they still have to cover the candidate. With the exception of his welfare ads, however, the Romney campaign has avoided an assault on Obama’s ideology. Romney’s entirely plausible strategy is to downplay the ideological battle (Ryan nomination notwithstanding)…

I can’t say for certain that Romney’s strategy is wrong. But I do think it’s far riskier than we realize. Treating Obama as a nice guy in over his head, rather than a smart leftist who knows exactly what he’s doing, leaves the Democrats’ bogus narrative about government unanswered. America is changing, and Republicans are naive to rely on the public to simply recognize the problems in the Democrats’ claims without significant help from our nominee…

I don’t have access to the Romney campaign’s focus-group and survey data. Maybe they’re right to try to pry away those erstwhile Obama supporters in only the gentlest of ways. Yet I worry that the Romneyites are fooling themselves. Technocrats and fixers from a state where liberals dominate, they are neither inclined or prepared to show how the Obama Democrats are slowly redefining American exceptionalism into the European social democratic dream. Romney may squeak by on bad unemployment numbers and gentle coaxing of undecideds, but patriotic veneer the Democrats have managed to slap on their leftism is worrisome. If Obama wins, it will be because we allowed him to get away with it.

Romney will lose if he doesn’t dramatically change his strategy. Negative ads won’t substitute for conservative ideas. politi.co/Q6xI2F

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) September 9, 2012

The Romney campaign is not conservative. It is just as cynical and risk-averse as Team Obama. A real conservative would be winning now.

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) September 9, 2012

The truth is that Thatcher would have lost in 1979 and Reagan would have lost in 1980 if they had run as timid a campaign ad Mitt Romney.

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) September 9, 2012

Via the Corner.

Via Mediaite.

• Regarding Lois Lerner, who does the Bill of Rights protect?
• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week

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